Thursday 3 April Talk for Get London Reading on the folklore of London at Harleseden Library

May - a talk at Marylebone Library to coincide with Local and Community History Month

June or July Walk for the London Adventure on Edward Burne-Jones

Forthcoming spring 2008

The Folklore of London (Historical Publications/Phillimore) Chapters to include: The Legendary Origins of London, Legendary Londoners, Strange Brew: London Publore, Uncanny Underground, Customs and Ceremonies and more...

a series of talks and walks will be arranged to coincide with publication

Decadent London

As the dawn of the twentieth century loomed, London was undergoing tremendous changes,

establishing itself as the heart of one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen.

However, in the same decade that witnessed the celebrations of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee,

a diverse group of writers, artists and poets sought to subvert the oppressive cultural and moral

climate of the period. This was the city explored by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley,

Frank Harris and Ernest Dowson, together with their less well-know compatriots

Lionel Johnson, John Gray, John Davidson and the mysterious Count Stenbock.

Using a thematic approach, Decadent London recreates the artistic milieu of this turbulent time,

describes the most popular decadent destinations and provides concise biographical material

on the central characters, many of whom became victims of their excessively louche lifestyles.

Visit the raucous decadent pubs such as the Crown and the Cock, listen in at the Cheshire Cheese,

where W B Yeats read his poems to the Rhymers' Club, enjoy the wit of Wilde and Whistler at the Café Royal

and explore the idyllic artistic retreat of Bedford Park in the suburbs.

The book also describes the work produced by London's decadent writers and artists,

particularly their contribution to the decade's most innovative periodicals

The Yellow Book and The Savoy. It outlines the development of the burgeoning music hall scene

beloved by many decadents, probes into the underworld of drug taking, pornography

and prostitution and uncovers the occult pursuits of the Golden Dawn and the Great Beast

Aleister Crowley.

This is an entertaining and informative glimpse into one of the most fascinating periods

in the capital's cultural history.

Reviewed by Christopher Fowler in the Independent on Sunday 8th January 2006:

"Every page of this gripping volume appears as a voyage of discovery in itself and as such it can only be described as a modern history masterpiece."

Heritage Railway May 2001 (Blimey!)

"An encyclopedia of the intestines of London...packed with detail often forgotten by the grand sweep historians...lavishly illustrated, this is a reference book of all that goes on beneath our feet..." Illtyd Harrington West End Extra

"The story of London's coffee consumption is so long, detailed and fascinating that it cries out for a study of its own. Fortunately, that cry has gone heeded by the freelance historian Antony Clayton, whose heavily illustrated and well-documented 2003 study, London's Coffee Houses: A Stimulating Story, performs the task admirably." Kevin Jackson and Richard Heeps Fast (Portobello Books, 2006)

"This short review cannot do justice to all the multifarious strands the author covers in this book...I was impressed by the very full notes and references at the end of each chapter as well as the wonderful range of quotations and illustrations he has unearthed." Peter Christie The Local Historian

Tuesday 27 March: a talk on entertainment in the West End in the 1890s, including theatre productions, music hall and the spectacular magic shows of Maskelyne and Cooke at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly.

Westminster Reference Library 35 St Martin's Street 18.30-19.45 FREE

Wednesday 23 May: The Folklore of London a talk for Adult Learners Week

Tuesday 23 May: a talk on the coffee houses of Covent Garden at the Museum and Library of Freemasonry, Freemason's Hall, Great Queen Street

Wednesday 24 May: a walk for Adult Learners Week to complement the previous evening's talk. 'Coffee House to Coffee Republic' exploring the history of the coffee house in the West End of London from the lively establishments around Covent Garden to the 1950s espresso bars and the recent Starbucks phenomenon

Tuesday 22 August: "Coffee House to Coffee Republic", an illustrated talk on the history of the coffee house in Westminster, that concentrated on Covent Garden in the eighteenth century and Soho in the 1950s. Held in Westminster Reference Library Art and Design Department

Saturday September 16th: I 'delivered a paper' on the Uncanny Underground at a conference called Railway Legend and Tradition held over the weekend of 16th and 17th September in Bristol. Other topics included: ghosts of the railways, trains in folk art, the, the Staplehurst railway disaster and songs and balladry of railwaymen; speakers included Doc Rowe, Dave Arthur and Bob Trubshaw.

Monday 18 September: a Green Plaque was unveiled on the site of the 2is coffee bar at 59 Old Compton Street at 14.30

Presented a copy of London's Coffee Houses to Sir Cliff Richard

Saturday 23 September: a talk for the Oscar Wilde Society Annual General Meeting at the Cadogan Hotel

"The Net is not a tool; it is, pace McLuhan, an environment, a resonating psychic amplifier that, among other things, erodes the barriers that separate centre and margin, news and rumour, opinion and advertisement, truth and delusion. This makes it a great breeding ground for alternative accounts of reality, for subculture and for those infectious mind viruses some call "memes." Detached from a common vision of public space and shared intellectual culture, online society becomes a hive of interest groups, fandoms, data-junkies, manufactured marketing niches, and virtual communities made up of solitary souls. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, the Web allows people to, "develop a pothole of culture out of which they can't climb.". . .

For even as the Web builds links between different world views, and encourages us to channel-surf the tangled noodles of the collective mind, the technology may wind up producing a rent in the fabric of consensus reality as wide as the ozone hole over Antarctica. Already we can see the runs: hoaxes and rumours breed true believers, worldviews become worlds, and bad ideas find like minds. No longer held in check by editors or lawyers or the snail's pace of the mail, anonymous and unsubstantiated claims, both spontaneous and engineered, now run like wildfire through the information environment, forcing institutions to issue official reactions and mainstream journalists to treat the rumours themselves as news . . . The Web is by nature a kind of conspiracy-machine, a mechanism that encourages an ever-broadening network of speculative leaps, synchronistic links, and curious juxtapositions."

Robinson had once told me how private behaviour would be increasingly monitored, not by the state, but by people themselves. Technological advance would be accompanied by private lines of retreat, a withdrawal."